Atos BullSequana XH2000 Supercomputer to Run on AMD EPYC Rome CPUs

Andrew Wheeler posted 2019-01-17

After AMD officially revealed their next gen ZEN 2 CPU architecture that uses 7nm instead of 10nm process node to power the EPYC Rome and Ryzen processors, multiple supercomputing companies have tapped the EPYC Rome processors. One such instance occurred on November 12, 2018 when Atos officially announced it would be supporting AMD processors with its BullSequana X range of  Liquid cooled supercomputers.

Reports have shown that Atos would be using up to 200,000 AMD Rome cores for high-performance computing (HPC) purposes in one supercomputer, thus highlighting the potential of AMD’s EPYC Rome processor upgrades. Moreover, the US Department of Energy also tapped AMD for the development of their current supercomputer, which is called Perlmutter. AMDs 7nm EPYC Milan CPUS and NVIDIA’s Volta- Next GPUs are under its hood. (Image courtesy of AMD.)

Atos plans on having two supercomputers for a broad range of applications. Their projects have been divided into two phases: the first phase involves the Cascade Lake CPU by Intel and the Tesla GPU by NVIDIA. This setup is called BullSequana X400, and the company estimates it will be completed sometime in 2019. In 2020, Atos aims to complete the BullSequana XH2000, which is powered by the AMD EPYC Rome. This will result in a massive processing output of 11 Petaflops.

Vice president HPC & Quantum at Atos, Agnes Boudot, stated that the strategic launch of an EPYC Rome blade with their BullSequana X2410 supercomputer in 2019 would bolster their partnership with AMD. He also stressed on how the HPC market was in dire need of a new engine that would increase performance efficiency by offering a higher memory bandwidth.

Corporate vice president and general manager at AMD datacenter products, Scott Aylor, underscored the importance of the collaboration between AMD EPYC processors and ATOS’ supercomputing systems, saying that Atos was well suited to deliver on the promise of EPYC product line.

Bottom Line

A total of 3125 AMD EPYC Rome processors would be housed in the new supercomputer. Each BullSequana X2410 Blade will comprise of 3 compute nodes placed adjacent to each other. These nodes would be equipped with 2 Rome processors and 16 DIMM slots for DDR4 memory. Because the Rome processors can feature up to 64 cores and 128 threads, the setup would give the supercomputer 200,000 cores and 400,000 threads therefore standing out as a powerful solution for HPC applications that require superior memory bandwidth and intensive compute tasks. This may result in a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

The estimated computing performance from the above setup is expected to be at 6.4 Petaflops thus surpassing their existing supercomputer’s efficiency by 5 times. Development cost estimates for the super computer are approximately $44.2 Million, and the estimated date of completion is 2020.